The Crime Writer (14 page)

“Don’t despair, Chicken Little. I got us a spray artist. We ride at first light.”

After the call I stared at the couch, but Genevieve wouldn’t reappear. I didn’t blame her. I was lousy company, and I might have shoved a boning knife through her rib cage.

Upstairs I dozed sporadically, finding myself wide awake at 1:00
A.M.
The Genevieve hour. Each whistle of the wind was a screen being slit, every creak in the house a foot set cautiously down. Turning on the lights before me, I retrieved spare cuts of plywood from the garage and hammered them across the broken windows in my front door.

Back in my bedroom, I lay in the darkness, surrounded by familiar shadows.

You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.

I’d looked stupid. It wasn’t a first. I’d spent the evening spinning my tires. Not like I had anything better to do. I’d played a card with Cal I could’ve saved for later. So what? I had more up my sleeve. Tomorrow could bring a graffiti-artist eyewitness, another body, a rise in the ocean that left us all breathing through snorkels.

For Genevieve, for Kasey Broach, for myself, I was committed. I was in the plot. After blood, sweat, and tears would come an ending, favorable or not.

For the first time since I’d awakened in that hospital bed, I slept soundly.

I
met Chic in a part of Compton that had been revitalized, meaning the crackheads looked better fed.

He leaned over my window and said, “Genevieve’s father invested in a company that owned a boutique that Kasey Broach once bought soap at. They bought car tires from the same wholesaler, Broach in person, Genevieve through her mechanic at Lexus.”

“What’s that give us?”

“Nuthin’ worth marking on the scorecard.” He grinned. “Database guy is good at digging stuff up, not necessarily
good
stuff. We’ll see what else he comes up with. I don’t think there’s gonna be much between the two of them—it’s a connection between Broach and
you
that would smell like pay dirt to me. If it links Genevieve, too, trifecta.” As we crossed the street, Chic flicked his chin at the warehouse up ahead. “That’s our boy’s art studio there.”

“Art studio?”

“That’s right. And don’t go embarrassin’ me and callin’ it graffiti.”

“What do I call it?”

“Aerosol art.”

“Naturally.”

We entered to find a large woman behind a reception desk, blowing on a set of fingernails that doubled the length of her hand. She looked up, eyebrows raised as if we’d shoved in on her in a changing room.

“Engelbert Humperdinck here’s lookin’ for Bishop,” Chic said, jerking his head in my direction, “but he didn’t want to come down alone because he’s afraid you all might put him in a cannibal pot.”

“One o’ them black ones?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Lemme go get it.” She pushed back from the desk and disappeared through a metal door. Her voice came amplified through the walls. “Bish! Folks here to see you!” We couldn’t make out the response, but we heard her say, “Then sit reception you
own
damn self.”

She reappeared, holding the heavy door for us to pass through. She eyed me as I passed. “He a cop or a buyer?”

“He a writer,” Chic said.

She snorted. “Which restaurant?”

We entered the warehouse proper. Aside from a desk in the far corner, several cardboard boxes, and a rotund naked black man, the room was empty. The man was giving us his generous backside, facing an enormous canvas, marked with splotches, that was strapped to the far wall. Paint dripped from his fingertips, streamed down his broad calves.

I looked at Chic, and he shrugged. We crossed the vast space, admiring the blown-up photos adorning the walls—distinctive graffiti art on trains, billboards, even a few cop cars. The cardboard boxes were full of spray-paint cans, tips and nozzles, night-vision goggles flecked with backspray.

Chic cleared his throat, but Bishop didn’t turn around. He bent over, plucked a roller from a pan of purple paint, and ran it from his shins to his neck. Emitting a bass roar, he charged forward and flung himself against the canvas, leaving a large purple mark. He took a few steps away from the wall, wiped himself down with a wet towel, and pulled on a pair of velour sweatpants.

“Interesting technique,” Chic said. “Seems like…”

“Bullshit?” Bishop said in a great rumble of a voice. “Course it is. But it fetch me three grand at the gallery. If you could get that for a Rorschach of your nutsack, tell me you wouldn’t.”

I said, “If I could get three grand for anything involving my nutsack, I would.”

He laughed. “You gentlemen lookin’ to buy?”

“Actually, just a quick question for you.” I unfolded a copy of the freeway ramp graffiti from my back pocket. I’d pulled some Kinko’s magic, blowing it up, zeroing in so as to leave the body out of frame.

Bishop glanced at it and said, “Wudn’t me.”

“I know the feeling,” I said, “but we’re not cops or prosecutors, and we don’t care that it’s illegal.”

“No, I mean it
wudn’t me.
” He gestured grandly to the surrounding photographs. “See the 103 tag? Lower-right corner, every time?”

I studied the photos. The numbers resolved, almost as in the posters at the mall that you squint at for twenty minutes before being awarded a 3-D image or a migraine.

“That ’ cuz I came up on 103rd in Watts.” Bishop tapped the copy in my hands. “Ain’t no 103 there. Beside, I don’t use no Amazon Green and Metallic Periwinkle. That ain’t Bishop’s palette. This some toy done bite my piece.”

“Translation for the white guy?”

“I’m a fame writer. That’s why y’ all knew to come find me. But this a toy writer, a kid comin’ up. He bite my work—copy my shit—to show props.”

“Do you recognize which kid made this graffi—”

Chic cut me off. “Aerosol art?”

“Course. That his name right there, fool.” Bishop flicked the paper in the upper-left corner. Hidden in the puffs and bubbles of color were two letters, rendered in abstract hypercalligraphy.
WB.
“West Manchester Boulevard, by the Forum in the ’ Wood. That where
he
came up. Inglewood. Junior do good work, bombs freeway ramps and long-term storage joints. No stencils or airbrushing shit, squiggles the tail on his
Q
s.”

He’d pronounced the name soft, Latin style:
Hoon-yore.

“He Mexican?” Chic asked.

“Ain’t no racial issues in the graf community. We about the
art.
”

“You know where we can find him?”

“Yeah. Boy send me fan mail.” Bishop plodded over to the little metal desk and dug in the drawers, sending candy-bar wrappers fluttering to the ground. He pulled out a crumpled letter from a drawer full of correspondence. It contained a Polaroid shot of a rolling storage door that had been transformed into a spray-paint wonderland. The letter read:

I flipped the envelope over. The return address listed a place called Hope House with an address on West Sixth. I pulled the Bic from behind my ear and copied the address in a black-leather detective’s notepad Cal had given me years ago.

“I gotta go meet with a distributor at the restaurant,” Chic said. “Think you’ll be safe visiting Junior without a big Negro holding your hand?”

“Dunno.” I looked at Bishop. “Wanna hold my hand?”

Bishop smirked. “I’m spoken for.”

A
guy with gang tattoos across his throat flew down the handicap ramp on a wheelchair and veered toward the van parked beside my car. I’d called Preston on my way over, and he’d googled Hope House for me. It proved to be a residential placement facility—social services–speak for a group home—just above MacArthur Park. It was a six-bedroom house, two kids per room, with overnight staff. Last stop before juvy for problematic Angeleno youth.

I climbed out of my car. The guy was laboring to get out of his wheelchair and into the driver’s seat.

“Give you a hand?” I asked.

He turned. The lettering on his baseball cap read
THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD GO YOU
. “Yeah, I came all the way down here, and I don’t know how to get in my fucking van.”

So far I was a hit.

The house was a dilapidated two-story—peeling paint, crooked shutters, the whole deal. I walked into a whirlwind of motion, young teens flying out of rooms, screaming at one another, tumbling over the broken-down play structure in the backyard. A Hispanic counselor paced, biting her nails, phone pressed to her ear. “His PO has
not
shown up, we’re short a driver, and I have to bail Patrick out, so I can’t take him.”

She hung up, blew a sigh. “Are you my driver?”

“No, I’m looking for Junior Delgado. I need to ask him—”

“Just”
—her hands flew out, then she caught herself and finished in a gentler tone—“go wait out back. You’ll have to talk to Caroline Raine—she’s our clinical therapist. She’s upstairs dealing with a contraband issue. She’ll be down in a sec, but this isn’t the best day. Grab a cup of coffee.” She pointed to a row of homemade mugs hanging from wooden pegs. “Might be a while. Wash it out when you’re done.”

Refueling on caffeine, I strolled out back and sat on the lip of a planter lled with dirt but no flowers, next to a kid who looked about as animated as James Taylor. “You know where Junior is?”

“Dunno, man.” He got up and trudged away. My presence had offended him.

It struck me how much movies had colored my view of kids’ homes. Here there were no long-lashed Latin boys with smooth skin, no girls flashing million-dollar smiles from beneath dirt-smudged faces, no eager minds waiting for a role model, a state-sponsored music program, a whimsical mathematics instructor. Just a lot of baggy shorts, Converse sneakers, and scowls. The play-structure slide had rusted, and two of the monkey bars were missing. I thought kids like this probably deserved something better to play on, but they seemed to be making do.

A Down syndrome kid sat in one of the cracked rubber swings, holding his head in his hands and weeping. “I waa ma mama.”

A boy in a lime green sweatshirt weighed in. “You killed your mom, retard.”

“I know. I know.”

I thought,
I will never complain about anything ever again.

A scrawny Latin kid, maybe fifteen, wore a Lee jacket, bell-bottom jeans, and PRO-Keds. He looked like someone Fat Albert had sat on. When he turned to huddle with a co-conspirator, I saw that the back of his jacket was custom-painted. Aerosol art, I believe the term is.

“Junior?”

He strolled over, sat down beside me, and straightened out my pronunciation of his name.

“Sorry. Is this your work? I’m not a cop, just an admirer.”

He glanced at the folded paper and smiled. “Yeah, thass me.”

“Painted it last Thursday night?”

“How you know that?”

I pointed to the pigeon feathers stuck to the concrete. “Paint was still wet. And this picture was dated. What time were you there?” It took me a moment to read his hesitation. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone you snuck out.”

“Late. I’d guess from, say, eleven forty-five to ten to two.”

“How sure are you?”

“More sure about the ten-to part.” He showed off an impressive Sanyo. “My watch beeps on the hour. I got a beep when I was biking home, ’ bout halfway.”

The time stamp on the first crime-scene photo had read 2:07
A.M.
Which led to my next question. “Why didn’t you finish your piece?”

“Got interrupted.”

“By a car?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you see what kind of car?”

“I see
everything,
homes.” Sensing my eagerness, he fixed his brown eyes on me. “Ms. Caroline say it okay for you to be here?”

“Didn’t say it wasn’t.”

“Uh-hunh. You seen her yet? I mean, laid eyes?”

“No.”

He grinned wolfishly.

“Why?” I asked.

“Excuse me, sir.”

I turned to see a woman standing over me. Her face, at first glance, was like a shattered, beautiful mask. Scars divided it, one starting at her hairline, curving around her temple, another beginning under her eye and bridging the bumps of her lips, splitting the edge of her mouth.

I dropped my coffee mug. It was probably due more to the zealous glaze job on the ceramic than to shock, but either way the effect was the same. I felt like a prissy Jane Austen heroine, teacup trembling on saucer as gossip came back from the ball. My mortification grew with each embarrassing arc the intact part of the mug described on the concrete, and Junior’s stifled laughter didn’t help.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I lost my grip.”

Her expression revealed nothing. The indentation in her lips didn’t align, and the path of the longer mark seemed equally haphazard. The scars were faded, the color blending, the skin slightly dappled in places from what I guessed were healed-over grafts. She was graying, but not by the strand or lock. All her hair had dulled slightly to a dusty sandalwood. It was lank, taken up in a twist around a pencil. Her features, glimpsed through the damage, were stunning. Icy green eyes, delicate mouth, lovely bone structure that accented her cheeks.

I offered my hand. “I’m Drew Danner.”

“I recognize you from your murder trial.”

Junior looked at the boy in the lime green sweatshirt, who mouthed,
Hells yeah.

“Junior, go to your room please.”

“Ms. Caroline—”

“Now.”

He hustled. I would’ve hustled, too.

“What do you want, Mr. Danner?”

“I’m trying to figure out what happened to me. I just had a few questions for Junior.”

“So you thought you’d come out here and interview one of my boys without getting approval from me?”

I forced a smile. “Be nice to me, I had a brain tumor?”

“Not gonna work here, buster.”

“Drat.”

“Clean up your mess and leave.”

She left me on the planter. The remaining kids laughed at me, the Down syndrome kid included, and the boy in the sweatshirt stuck out his tongue. I wanted Junior’s description of the car that had interrupted his spray-paint job, but could see no acceptable way to get to him. Now.

I collected the ceramic shards in my palm and found a trash can a few steps up a hall. From the other room, I heard Caroline’s and the counselor’s raised voices.

“Judge Celemin has had it. He misses another appearance, he’s going straight to the hall.”

“What can we do, Caroline? I have to bail out Patrick—now—and the driver flaked. It’s okay, there’s nothing—”

“No, it’s
not
okay. I didn’t double-schedule staff, and now he’s gonna wind up in the hall because of me.”

I left them to the joys of charitable enterprise.

I was pulling out when a bang on my window startled me upright. Caroline Raine gestured for me to roll down the window. I had the sense that when Caroline Raine suggested you do something, you did it. She thrust a document onto my steering wheel. “Here. Sign this. No, here. Now you’re a Big Brother. Through our facility. Take Junior to court—you’re already late. It’s just one hour out of your day, and you’ll save him from juvenile hall.”

I pictured the book jacket:
Tuesdays with Junior.
“Are you kidding me?”

“You can question him all you want on the way. Not that it’ll get you anywhere.”

“How do you know I’m not some psycho?”

“Clinician’s eye.”

“I was up for murder.”

“By reason of insanity is pretty tame compared to these kids. Junior’ll eat you for lunch.”

“After what I’ve been through,” I said, “I’m probably toxic. I think I can handle a kid with some attitude.”